Day Two
I remember that morning
vividly. It wasn’t the Outback, there
were still fences, but the landscape opened up like untying a brown
parcel. It became immense. Even though 50 riders started off almost
together, we soon became strung out.
There were younger more vigorous riders who wanted to burn it up out
front. There were those who wanted to
dawdle and take photos of everything from yellow-flowering wattle trees to dead
kangaroos. I sort of found myself in the
middle. Mostly I stuck to Pete’s tail,
terrified I would get lost if I didn’t.
(It was bloody easy to miss those coloured ribbons marking our route).
But on occasion I was the only person in a gigantic flat bushland. Solitary Max.
It was quite cold early on, before the sun had warmed the world. The wind cut through me as I hurtled into it
at 70 kms. I made a mental note to stuff
newspaper down the front of my jacket.
This is what I had joined this
rally for. Being alone in the Australian
hinterland is indescribable. It’s truly
awe-inspiring, frightening in its immensity, and stunning in its aspect. I felt so very privileged to be able to
experience such a scene. It drained me
of all the bad feelings I had ever had.
It filled me with wonder. My spirit expanded with the wide open
wilderness as I hummed and rattled along the road, the bush stretching to
infinity on either side, to back and to front.
I was in the bubble of a sky the size of a universe. It was royal blue with puffs of cloud like
the spots on a fallow deer’s flanks.
Except, down the centre of heaven was this long, long cloud, oh, a
hundred kilometres long, under which I travelled most of the morning. Talk about white-line fever. I had one under me and one over me.
And crossing this rufous, sandy
landscape horizontally, every half-hour or so, was a narrow creek. It might be CARVING KNIFE CREEK, or WOOMBA
CREEK, or simply, JACK’S CREEK. Most had no water in them. One or two did. The trees around waterholes hid kangaroos and
other wildlife. But I have to say most
of the roos I saw were road kills, that threw up an unholy stink from their
open-vault graves. No doubt they’d been
hit by road trains, trucks or big cars.
Unlike the rabbits or crows of England, they didn’t flatten. If they were actually on the tarmac their
bloated forms looked like hot-air balloons.
I swerved round them, disturbing a thousand flies. Some of them were meals for the
carrion-eating whistling kites, that soared overhead.
Today we started out towards
Mundubbera, heading first towards Cracow.
I saw a twelve-inch blue-tongued lizard crossing the road in front of
me: lovely creature. Around me the bush,
with the occasional shrub, dwarf tree, or rocky outcrop. The noise from my bike engine was
excruciating after a while. It grated on
the nerves and I realised why a lot of the lads wore earplugs. Also my riding gear was uncomfortable. The goggles pressed my glasses into the
bridge of my nose. Flies got inside the
helmet and drove me insane. I itched in
various places. My bum got sore after
two hours. My teeth rattled along with
the loose bits of metal on the bike frame.
When I hit a bump in the road the jolt went right up my spine and kicked
my cerebellum like a football. The
scenery was magnificent. The method of
viewing it less so.
That last evening one of the
Ozzie biker boys had sat down next to me after the meal and had started to talk
bikes. Pistons, drive-chains, cooling
ribs, fairings, etc., etc. He might have
been speaking in the tongues of angels, so far as I was aware. My eyes glazed over after five minutes,
though I listened politely for half-an-hour before saying, ‘Look mate, I
appreciate your enthusiasm, but I’m not a biker. I’m on this trip for other reasons.’ He stared at me in a puzzled way for a minute
or two, then said, ‘Yeah, OK, mate . . .’ then carried on for the next
hour-and-a-half in the same vein as before, without pause for breath.
If I knew nothing about bikes
when he’d started his talk, I knew even less about them at the end, realising
as one does, how complex and intricate was this holy subject, and how utterly
confused I was by it. I knew where the
gear lever was (quite a lot of the time actually) and the rear brake (when I
remembered it wasn’t on the handlebars, like the front brake) and a few of the
little switches like the fuel switch and cut-out switch, oh, and the bung hole
where you top up with oil, but as to what lay beneath the cladding, that was
still a occidental secret. I could lube
my chain, refill my fuel tank, put air in the tyres, check the oil, start and
stop the machine (with only occasional hiccups) and that was good enough for
the run we were on. If anything else
went wrong I ran to Richard-the-mechanic and started to cry. Richard is one of those unsung geniuses who
know everything about bikes and probably bikers, has taught kings and princes
the fundamentals of bike maintenance, and who never ever reveals his disdain
for idiots like me. When fixing whatever
it was that had gone wrong he always told me what he was doing, why he was
doing it, and what the end product should be.
Miraculously I absorbed these
snippets of knowledge so that next time I could fix the same problem myself.
The run to Cracow was just short
of 200 kms, some of it over gravel roads which required a certain amount of
respect.
In a roadside café, many of us
were sipping coffee, dressed in our biker gear, with the robust red Honda
Postie Bikes propped up in a neat row in the parking lane outside. A little old lady of the Outback entered and
stared around with saucer eyes at the luminous-jacketed riders.
‘My goodness,’ she said, ‘what
are all you posties doing out here?’
One of the guys, on his way to
the exit, said firmly, ‘Step aside if
you please, madam - the mail must get through.’
We laughed then let her in on the
secret. She laughed with us.
At another place, a real postie
joined the end of our straggling line of machines, staying with us for a couple
of kilometres, before turning off on a farm track and waving a cheery goodbye.
Cracow is an ex-gold-mining town
in the unlikely named Banana Shire area.
Cracow was obviously named after the Polish city with a different
spelling. All we saw of this ghost town
was the Cracow Hotel, which is owned by a guy called Fred Brophy, a famous bush
boxing manager. The large bar inside the
hotel (which looks a bit like a giant clapboard shack) is crammed with
artefacts, from antlers to music boxes to worn saddles. It’s an Aladdin’s cave of junk that would
send a Victorian era collector into shudders of ecstasy. Apparently tourists are attracted the place,
one of the reasons being there is probably no other watering hole in the
district. I liked it. It has to be seen. We were told the first bit of gold to be
found, back in the glory days of Cracow, was discovered by some wandering
fossil hunters. Then another nugget was
picked up by an Aborigine (who I hope made himself a rich man) and the
subsequent mine was only closed down in 1976.
And so we thundered on towards
the famous Banana itself, a small town named after a dun-coloured bullock who
lived and died there in the mid-1800s, a beast held in affection by the local
stockmen who used old Banana to herd the wilder elements of their cattle into
the stockyards. That’s what you do in
Oz. You don’t have fancy Anglo-Saxon or
Viking names for your towns. You name
them after your favourite hound or work horse.
And past Banana we went, with barely a backward glance, intent on
reaching our goal which was the town of Rolleston over 200 kms away. We were staying at the Rolleston racecourse
that night. My little motorbike was hot
between my thighs and as we ate bitumen at the end of that day I recalled
similar bikes and bikers I had seen in various parts of the world, especially
on the Asian continent.
The small motorbike has been a
great boon to the poorer areas of the world (some of them no longer so
poor). I’ve spent a great deal of time
in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and other Asian countries and have witnessed
some hair-raising small-motorbike-sights.
I remember once seeing two men
riding in Ho Chi Min city. One guy was
sitting on the saddle, head down, throttle open to the limit. His friend was standing on the pegs over the
top of him. In the hands of the standing
man was a huge pane of plate glass. His
arms were stretched wide in the shape of a crucifix, his fingers hooked around
the far edges of the glass. Around, in
front, behind, and just about everywhere, were other bikes, cars, trucks -
whizzing near this pair with only fractions of a inch to spare. I leave it to your own imagination how close
these two came to death by multiple lacerations.
In another Far Eastern land, it
was quite common to see a man sitting on a small motorbike with a live domestic
beast sitting on the pillion seat, usually a pig, its front trotters tied
together, its legs around the neck of the driver of the vehicle. It seemed never to bother either rider or
passenger that they were cheek by jowl, the snout of the sow alongside the nose
of the man. In fact it appeared to be
the most natural thing in the world and I wonder if conversations were held
between the two, one in animalese and the other in humanese. A grunt here, a snort there, an understanding
developing over the journey to market.
By the afternoon we were still not in the
Outback. I could see fences all
around. There were irrigation channels
too. Someone, Ewan I think, said he’d
noticed cotton farming around the area.
Ewan came from Darwin, so he knew the north well. He was a tall quietly-spoken man with
‘Lonesome Rider’ on his back. I liked
him. There was no brashness or side
about Ewan.
We refuelled at Theodore that
day. Refuelling was done off the back of
one of the trucks. You started out in
the morning with 5 litres in the bike tank and five litres in the spare
can. That would, in theory, take you 250
kms or more, depending on the rider’s weight and how fast you pushed the bike
along. Some days, like today, we had 450
kms to do. At the refuelling, usually
midday or thereabouts, you took on another 10 litres and so could finish the
journey comfortably.
In the afternoon we passed mining
operations with trucks going back and forth.
Otherwise it was endless road, going on to the edge of the world. I’m told that one of the riders, a guy named
Cam, was attacked by a dog in Theodore town.
Then in the afternoon a Jack Russell flew at him from out of
nowhere. I noticed him around the
Rolleston camp, later, with ‘Two Dogs’ written on his back. Cam must give off one of those atmospheres
that drives dogs wild. Who knows, maybe
he had some kangaroo dung on his boots?
There were two more casualties in
camp. One of the women had fallen off
her bike on the dirt road coming into the camp.
Her leg was injured and the ambulance was called for. Also someone else was stretched out on his
back, clearly in pain from that area.
Two days and three casualties?
Heck, at this rate would get through half our number before the ride was
over.
There was a sheet we were
supposed to sign when we arrived at our destination every day. It was a simple task, but one which I
constantly failed at. As usual when I
arrived at the camp that afternoon I forgot to sign the arrival sheet. I always forgot to sign it and in the end
they got tired of bollocking me. My head
was so full of long white clouds and distant horizons there was no room for
ordinary things like the signing of sheets to confirm that I wasn’t actually
lost out in the wilderness, but here in camp humming a simple tune as I knocked
in tent pegs one by one. Kylie must have
got awfully tired of this Pom.
We had corned beef, cooked Aussie
Outback style, for dinner, amongst a bunch of vegetables and bread. And pudding too. Followed by coffee or tea. It was clear from the start we weren’t going
to starve on this run. I had thought I
might be able to lean down over the trip but the meals on those first two days
soon put that wish back at the bottom of the well. I could just not eat so much, of course,
which would do the trick, but damn me it would be a strong man who could resist
that country cooking after a day in the saddle, yippy-ay-yay old buddy.
Everyone was getting to know each
other a bit better by this second evening and exchanging stuff about home
towns, home countries, home continents.
The Aussies and the Kiwis got on best of course, and worst, just like
rival neighbours anywhere. They reminded
me of the English and Scots back home.
When I see some Kiwis and Aussies sitting together, I just like to toss
in the world ‘rugby’ or ‘cricket’ and watch as the temperature rises on both
sides of the table. The Brits and the
Yanks did not have the same ground to battle on. They don’t play soccer or rugby and we don’t
play baseball or their football, so we ended up being awfully polite to one
another, which was a bit tame. I went to
look for Pete later, to have a talk about cricket. He was good for a blast at any time and would
lambaste the English cricket team at the drop of an Akubra, while I - albeit
with lesser ammunition - would have a good go at destroying the myth of
Australian cricket domination.
I went to bed that night about
8.30, along with most of the camp. I
woke again at about 11.30 and went to the toilet. It was dark over the camp site but there was
one area where it was lit. Under a pool
of light that fizzed with black clouds of flying insects the small team of
mechanics were still hard at work.
Richard, Lang, Mick and Andy were probably all there, tinkering away
with problems we had given the machines during the day. I noticed a sad-looking bike with its guts
strewn all over a slab of concrete flooring, the frame already thick with
dirt. An autopsy. How the heck these
metal surgeons put such dismembered bikes back together, all the bits in the
right places, was beyond a mind like mine. This scene of engineering men -
heads uncluttered by literary junk - toiling under late lamplights, righting
mechanical wrongs, repeated itself over the next few nights.
It was of course a long way from
the world of the wordsmith, this world of mechanics, though I too have laboured
nights at getting the right line in the right place, turning a few jumbled
words into a poem. This was a vision of
men who had made a modern day craft into an art. My work had never been good enough to cross
boundaries like that. I could not turn
an art into a useful thing: others took what I did and did that. They took my words and produced books. I have the greatest admiration for men like
Lang who can rebuild antique aircraft and then have the guts to fly their
recreations halfway round the world.
Men like Lang Kidby turn metal
puzzles into actual shapes that one can not only touch and smell, see and hear,
but that can do things like race
along the road or fly in the air. I’ve
written 80 novels and over 200 short stories, but they don’t race and they
don’t fly, they don’t do anything except sit there and wait to be read. As for engineering, if I can mend the toilet
ballcock when it goes wrong (which I can
do fellah) I congratulate the engineer in me.
To understand the precision-made parts of a modern machine, to make an
engine actually work, must be immensely satisfying. That kind of achievement is so far out of my
mental territory it might as well be on the moon.
The blow-up pillow was useless, so I stuffed a
sock bag with a towel and used that. It
wasn’t like home, but then nothing was.
Indeed, I slept well until shocked awake by clanks and crashes. I sat bolt upright at 4 am thinking we’d been
invaded and the tanks were breaking down the metal corrals. Then I remembered we were in the middle of
Queensland and tanks would have job getting through the bull dust. It turned out to be a cattle station nearby,
that was loading up its cattle B Doubles (articulated cattle trucks) ready for
the day. What a racket! Had no one told them there were tired bikers
in the next field? Would they have given
a monkey’s uncle if they had been told?
Of course not. I managed to fall
asleep again, but my dreams were full of sledgehammers.
No comments:
Post a Comment